Artful Aardvark Alpha 1 Released

"Ten billion ants in this world, and I’m having trouble with just one."
– Aardvark from The Ant and the Aardvark

The first alpha of the Artful Aardvark (to become 17.10) has now been released!

This milestone features images for Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin.

Pre-releases of the Artful Aardvark are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this release ready.

Alpha 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.

While these Alpha 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Artful Aardvark. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Alpha 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 17.10 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu based on LXDE and focused on providing a very lightweight distribution.

If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop the Artful Aardvark, we suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases and other interesting events.